"Mica... Please. You have to go."

  Nausicaa's breathing was labored. Her instruments whooped and protested as her Arrowhead turned overhead. "This is nothing we can't handle," she said. "Don't sully your hands like ours."

  "No... No, I'm not leaving you!" Mica cried, her fingers tensing on the yoke. "I can still—"

  "...For fuck's sake. You're not going to be any help, you can barely fly that thing! Go!"

  No... Mica looked back over her shoulder at the white furball twisting over the spindle of the Academy. She watched the Black Adder swing its white whip into one of her classmates and the spark bursting into flames as her craft spun out. Seconds passed between the explosion and the rumble rattling the cockpit. She felt hollow, like she'd been carved out.

  "Nausicaa... You dumbass."

  Mica gulped down her tears. In the end, there wasn't a world in which she could fight back no matter how much she wanted to. It felt like the strength she would've needed was just beyond her reach, beyond the ice white of the sky. Feeling like the lowest thing in the world, she tipped the craft's nose towards the eroded rock. Every joint in her body felt frigid and restless with impotence.

  She couldn't even say she'd shamed her family; mom and dad would've told her to run too, the cowards. Even now they had no honor.

  "Ghh." She gritted her teeth. There was the low hum of something operating as she turned the flow valve. The fuel needle tumbled sharply.

  Nausicaa said it was safer than ejecting, but she'd need to time the landing right. The Arrowhead was far from aerodynamic; rather, it had a high enough thrust-to-weight ratio that it flew in spite of the air. But once the engines cut out, its stubby wings would do little to stop it from plunging to the ground. Got to pick a spot that where that wouldn't be a problem. Mica slowly banked towards one of the dig sites and tried to line up with a flat stretch of terrain, raking as low as she felt safe, eyes on the depleting fuel tank as it resolved to zero.

  "Steady... Steady... Now!"

  The engines whistled silent until there was nothing but a rattle.

  Shit shit shit! Blood rushed to her head as the nose lurched down, and down, further than she'd have liked even as she fought it on the yoke. There was a metal shriek as the ventral fin clipped the ground and split soil rushed over the cameras. The shadow of the earth buried everything in darkness.

  Mica couldn't feel her legs. Her extremities felt fuzzy, like a cloud. Both ears rang from the fury of crushing the bottom of the fuselage, which had scraped metallic across the dry rock for what felt like an eternity. Only a single alarm rang out in the darkened cockpit, a high-pitched, repeating tone like a dipping bird.

  Was she even brave enough to open her eyes? It took a few minutes, but eventually, she did. Black—a wall of blank MFDs. She noticed the bright tree of her meridians in the dark. All her limbs were still attached.

  "Shit. Fuck." She flicked a switch on and off. The main radio was dead. Both the APU and the backup electrics had probably cushioned her landing.

  No choice then. Her first priority was to make someone aware she was alive.

  Mica grabbed the rebreather from behind the seat and plugged out the side escape hatch, her legs wobbling like a doe on the cold, narrow steps. One by one, she heaved and arrayed her crash supplies on the sand in the Arrowhead's shadow. What a workout. She rested with back to the still-warm hull, the windchill whipping her face until it was numb. She was losing a lot of heat. Maybe she'd need something a little more substantial than her Z-suit if she was going to find another survivor.

  The crew survival kit consisted of a black trauma vest that was on the large side, as well as a plump, snub-nosed rifle—20mm airburst. Her fingers settled easily in the whorls of bloated neoprene; it felt more like a weighted pillow than a gun. Maybe she was meant to cuddle it as she cried herself to sleep.

  In the orange go bag was a bundle of flares, a first-aid kit, foil bedroll, heat packs, silkworm bars, and four catties of water split into miniscule foil baggies. With the rebreather doffed, she could gulp down at most one of either ration before hypoxia set in. The brick-in-the-stomach feeling of existing on the edge of death did not evade her.

  Lastly, at the bottom of the bag, she found a box of little white sticks. Tampons. She felt vile all of a sudden and ducked her head as if there were someone to apologize to. If she didn't find anybody who could use them, they'd make decent kindling.

  ...Right, where to first? Mica shielded her eyes and peered out over the flat sands.

  She tried to find the nearest point of interest without making herself known to the enemy. From here, the Academy and its shimmering shield fit in the length of her index finger. She grimaced; apart from the two Navy frigates still shooting back, the only birds left in the sky were Feds.

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  About two li downwind was the newer quarry tucked behind a ragged outcropping. After the expedition this morning, the President had wanted it checked out, but she couldn't recall if they managed it in the time between 1-E's patrols. The flats around the rock were ringed with boxy yellow vehicles on tall dirt-caked wheels; base crawlers, probably abandoned during the fighting. Upwind, thin cress-sprouts of smoke marked a scattering of fires, nearer to the old dig site and the waystation—likely the first place anyone would look, if they even sent out a search party. Although, even if they did, it was impossible to tell if anyone remembered her who wasn't already dead.

  "Nausicaa..." She kicked a rock across a berm, her voice choked. "You bastards, leaving me alone like that. Who the hell do you think you are?"

  Mica slung the go bag over her shoulders and trudged towards the new dig site. Something about the bitter wind sharpened the eye in the back of her head, put emotions into a clarity normally beyond a branch heiress like herself. There were tall, unfamiliar meridians closing from the shorn rocks, around twenty trees with trunks gnarled with something uncomfortable. Fear. Disgust. Probably saw the bird go down.

  Even if she knew how to use this thing, there weren't enough grenades for all of them. Trunk family's exuberance, typical. I'm not dying here. She broke from her walk into a hunching run, ready at any second to hit the dirt and shoot back. No flickers in the meridians, but she caught the glint of their amplifying helmets in the sun. They hadn't seen her, but they were about to. She needed to lose them.

  There...! She noticed a narrow ravine cut into the outcrop and ran into its shadow, flanked by rainbows of banded rock revealed by eons of acid rain. It was still and silent: the wind didn't reach here. Her shoulder leaned on the cold, pitted wall as she tried to catch her breath. If she could just get inside the site proper, she might be able to find a strong enough radio to contact the Academy; or at worst, barricade herself inside until the fighting resolved, whoever the victor was.

  Mica didn't get far into the ravine before she rounded a corner and saw a group of Feds at the end of a long gash in the rock. Three well-appointed women walking this way; the Feds didn't have a uniform so much as a rough body-plan into which they piled trauma plates, pouches and electronics. Shit, why didn't she feel them before? The red outcropping must've been iron-rich, scattered the electromagnetic waves or sent them round in circles. She instantly ducked behind a small boulder and fingered the fan of ranging keys on the grenade launcher's grip. Could she afford to use the ranging laser, or would those Feds see it through their goggles?

  I have to hide. Hiding; she was used to hiding. Something welled up in her eyes but she held the muzzle down, crawled further into the gap between the boulder and the wall.

  When the water rioters came for her father, she'd used piled refuse for cover as she crawled through the backalleys to safety. But hiding was a thing was a thing she did alone; the men put up posters of her father, so it was easy to imagine some of them remembered her face and wouldn't take kindly to her. She'd had a gun back then as she did now, but to actually use it would've been tantamount to suicide.

  For a moment back there, up in the sky—she'd wondered if fighting was a thing you did with friends, and if that wouldn't have been a better way to end things.

  Before she could finish that thought, she felt several trees approaching from the direction in which she came. Fuck, there's no way out! Her hands pawed at her vest and made a running count of magazines. It didn't matter, there wasn't even a guarantee she could fire them off before they shot her. Her neck was wet with sweat despite the cold, and she could feel her heart slowing paradoxically. Vasovagal response. Her body literally thought she was better off playing dead. Breathe, breathe—

  Here we go. Come and get me! Mica racked the foreskin of the launcher and stepped out from behind the boulder—

  Only for something—something like fingers—to grab her by the ankle and trip her flat on her face. Again. The same place where Io had dropped her, although this time it was the mask that took the brunt of the beating. Her knuckles stung from scraping the rock. Whoever tripped her was quick to hook their arms under her armpits and cover her mouth. A gloved hand quickly inspected the plastic mask and nudged it back into place.

  "Who—" Mica barely got out the word, her throat constricted with fear. "How?!"

  Just how had she not sensed this attacker waiting right behind her? Another clanker like that weird fucking maid? She saw the sleeve of a white labcoat stained with red dirt—a student?

  "Sshhhh." A girl's voice. "Try to breathe as quietly as you can. And don't say a word; I can't do anything about that pot mouth of yours."

  Mica didn't have a choice. She exhaled slowly, her body still tense in the girl's grip.

  When she opened her eyes, the world around the two had turned black.

  It wasn't like night had fallen. It was as if the sun itself had gone out, and the only light in the entire world came from a torch on the breast of Mica's suit, picking out at most her nose, a few rocks and the white sleeve that clutched her by the chest. And even that light terminated a few inches past her shoes. It was so cold that she could see her own breath blow out the mask.

  "Pull your knees in a little. I can't keep this up otherwise."

  Mica obeyed and pulled her knees up. The darkness shrank closer as if in response. She heard footsteps approaching, the squawking of mobile radios, women talking in a dialect of Calcuttan she wasn't familiar with. The footsteps were so loud she could swear they were right in front of her, past the wall of black.

  After what felt like hours, the footsteps and the chatter receded into the distance before vanishing completely. Mica let out a deep breath. Slowly, the girl behind her released her grip, and the cold red outdoors flooded back into the sphere of darkness.

  "I... Thank you." Mica dusted off the legs of her suit and bowed, her face all pink in awareness of just what a brick she'd been. But more than that, confusion. "Who are you? What was that?"

  "Fredda Nous. House Jura. That should answer both of your questions... I, I hope..."

  The bespectacled girl suddenly stumbled, breathing heavily as if she'd been sprinting. Mica quickly grabbed her before she fell over. Her shoulders felt like jelly.

  "I'm never doing that again," the girl whined through her mask. "Couldn't you have been a little smaller?"

  "Excuse me?" That was certainly the first time anyone had said that about Mica. There were certainly times she'd wished she were more than 5 feet tall.

  As the boffin collected herself, her bright eyes looked Mica up and down, lingering in particular on the gun. With a fainting smile, she threw her arm over Mica's shoulder and tucked her close as if they'd been friends all this time.

  "C'mere, Tian Lung... You're gonna be useful yet."